Does Your Kid Really Need Therapy? Stella O'Malley on Teens, Mental Health, and the Problem With Professionals

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2023

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stella O'Malley is a psychotherapist in Ireland who works with adolescents and their families. She's also an author, documentarian, and speaker, but many Unspeakable listeners may know her from her podcast Gender A Wider Lens, which she co-hosts with therapist (and early Unspeakable guest) Sasha Ayad. This conversation covers aspects of the gender debates, but the main occasion for Stella's visit is her new book, What Your Teen Is Trying To Tell You: Surviving, Thriving and Reconnecting Through The Teenage Years. In it, she writes about how overreliance on mental health professions has undermined parents' confidence in their own judgment and instincts. Too often, at the slightest sign of trouble, therapists are brought into the picture, leading everyone to pathologize what in many cases are simply normal, if uncomfortable feelings. Stella discusses the impact of psychotropic prescriptions, the element of social contagion when it comes to "having mental illness," and posits that the absence of organized religion has created a spiritual void in teenagers that can lead to depression. (Meghan is surprised by this and wonders if this is an Irish thing.) Stell also talks about what it's been like to be at the forefront of conversations about gender dysphoria and stays overtime to talk about her own dysphoria as a kid.

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Guest Bio:

Stella O'Malley is a psychotherapist, best-selling author, public speaker, and parent with many years of experience working in counseling and psychotherapy. Born in Dublin, Stella lives in rural Ireland, where she runs her private practice and lives with her husband and two children. Find her at http://www.stellaomalley.com/.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dow. We took last week off,
0:09.3	a little spring break so you could catch up on your episodes and I could catch my breath amid
0:14.8	truly insane number of projects I've got going. I have some announcements about one project in particular. And before I
0:22.4	introduce this week's guest, Stella O'Malley, I will tell you about them. They have to do with,
0:27.9	wait for it, the unspeak easy, my community for free thinking women. It is a huge time around here for
0:36.4	us. The first big news, the online community has launched.
0:41.6	So this is a private social media platform. I guess that's the best way to describe it.
0:47.8	Design for women who, let's just say, are tired of some of the group think on places like
0:53.9	Facebook. I guess the best way to describe it
0:57.5	is it's like a little mini Facebook, except everything stays in the community. We have different
1:03.8	discussion forums for different areas like politics, arts and culture, climate, science, medicine, gender, feminism,
1:13.6	everything you can think of.
1:14.8	We're always adding new sections.
1:16.5	We also have discussion forums that have nothing to do with the culture wars, knitting,
1:23.1	so there's recipes.
1:24.3	We've been posting a lot of pet photos.
1:27.3	And I have to say, it's pretty great.
1:30.7	There are some amazingly smart women in there. I think everybody's really smart. And everybody is
1:37.8	very respectful. By no means does everyone agree? Not at all, actually. But the conversations have been truly substantive. It's kind of like,
1:47.9	you know, occasionally you see something on social media, we're like, oh, this is a really good
1:52.4	conversation. I'm enjoying this thread. I like the people on this comment thread. That's like
1:57.0	every thread we have going on the unspeak easy in the online community. I saw a conversation
	...

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